Winchester Cussedness
by Loki's Scribe
Summary: After his falling out with Ellen, John isn't certain he wants anything else to do with a female involved in hunting, even an armed-and-armored recluse like Bobbi Singer. Bobbi and John's girls, however, have different ideas. AU


_Characters not mine._

_(Originally written for a gender AU challenge on comment_fic. Because the very idea shook the dynamic between the four characters up so much that it insisted I turn it into a proper AU.)_

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John Winchester did most of his hunting solo, and when circumstance pushed a partner on him, he generally demanded they be male and, if at all possible, single. His inner chivalrous bastard had seen too many people get hurt while he was hunting to be comfortable with a woman at his back.

He figured the inner chivalrous bastard had every right to win this one. After all, it was still alive after he'd put a gun in his not-quite-seven-year-old daughter's hands a few years before.

So when he pulled up at Singer Salvage and discovered that Jim Murphy had failed to tell him he was being sent to a demon expert that spelled Bobbi with an "i," he taught Deanna, who was listening, several interesting new words.

She looked up at him with mild concern. "Dad?"

John's attempts at a profanity filter had broken down permanently upon Mary's death, but he still added, "Don't repeat that. Especially not in front of your sister."

The eight-year-old glanced into the backseat, where Sam was thankfully distracted by a comic book, and looked back at her father. That was not the response she'd been looking for.

"I mean it," John added lamely.

"She'll learn it from you," Deanna assured him, with that father-weary sarcasm his eldest was so good at when John was in a mood to take it. "What's up?"

"An unexpected snag. Stay in the car."

That had not been the answer Deanna was looking for, either, if the way she glared at him was any indication, but it was Sammy who was the champion pouter and at any rate John just rolled his eyes and climbed out of the Impala. He slammed the door a little harder than necessary in hopes of getting the proprietor's attention.

Bobbi Singer backed out from under the hood of the car she'd been working on and tried to wipe some grease off on her jeans. "I can tell from a mile off you need a new muffler—"

John shook his head. "I'm not here for the car."

"Oh?"

Did he_ really_ want to do this? He was aware of female hunters, of course, but he had steered systematically clear of all women that had anything to do with the profession since Bill Harvelle's death and the subsequent falling out with Ellen. But he did need someone who knew what they were doing, and it was only information he was looking for. "Jim Murphy sent me."

"Oh." She reached over and slammed the car hood, tried one more time to wipe the grease off her right hand, and extended it anyway when that didn't work. "Bobbi Singer. And if you give me a false name you can't expect any help."

He took it. "John Winchester."

She gave him a long, slow look, like she was trying to memorize every detail of his face. "Like the rifle."

He stared right back. She was a little bit older than he was, and he thought there might be a little gray around her temples, but it was hard to tell when she kept her hair out of her face with a battered trucker's cap. She was dressed in layers of flannel and denim, solidly built, and more tomboy-girl-next-door than pretty, but that only made her look like she wouldn't break in half as she kicked his ass. "Yes."

Maybe it was his tone, maybe it was just putting it simply, but that seemed to satisfy her. She let go of his hand and crossed her arms over her chest. "Call me Bobbi. And if Jim sent you, whatever demon you're after's gotta be bad."

"Uh—"

Before he could actually say anything, there was a crash from up by the house, and a big black dog—some kind of mutt but with a lot of rottie—was staring at the hubcap it had just knocked off its perch. Then it shook itself in the canine equivalent of a shrug and ambled closer to investigate the newcomers. Bobbi gave the dog a glance and ignored it, but it had attracted the attention of more than the adults.

"Daddy!" The screech was Sam's. "There's a dog!"

John glanced back at the Impala. Sam was pressed up against the backseat window, eyes on the furry four-legged beast. Deanna caught his eye with a long-suffering and pleading expression. Sam was at the age where anything with fur was automatically her best friend ever. Deanna was making it clear she didn't want to sit in a bouncing car.

He turned back to Bobbi. "Does it bite?"

"She might take a bite outta you, but she knows those two are just pups." Bobbi shrugged. "I don't have a problem with it."

John nodded to his girls, and the back door opened at approximately the speed of sound, with Sam barreling towards the dog. Deanna got out much more slowly, trying to indicate that she was far too old to be excited by anything so normal as someone's old watchdog. "Sam!" John barked, warning, but she got in control of herself, coming to a halt maybe a foot away from the startled dog, who snuffled at her for a moment before Sam threw her arms around its bull-sized neck. The dog snuffled at her hair, but after a moment the stump tail started wagging, and John felt himself relax.

Bobbi cocked her head slightly. "Two girls?" she asked, and smiled slightly. "Martha'll take care of 'em out here. You come inside and we'll see if I've got the information you're lookin' for."

* * *

Most of Bobbi's living room turned out to be a frankly enormous supernatural library, with books overflowing on the shelves and stacked on every available surface. Bobbi thumbed through the mess like it was perfectly organized, firing question after question at him, not all of which John knew the answer to. Finally, she stopped and swept a hand expansively over an entire shelf. "It could be anything here. How much d'you actually know about demons?" she demanded.

John glared at her and changed the subject. "How old're most of those books?"

Bobbi turned to him with an expression nearly identical to the one Deanna wore when she told her old man he hadn't slept in three days, or Sam when she felt the need to describe, in detail, precisely how hard tv dinners got when Dee put them in the microwave for twenty minutes. He didn't remember Mary ever wearing it, but even so he was pretty certain the "fucking stupid thing to do" look was encoded into female DNA somehow. "Sit down," she suggested.

John glanced around the room. The only two actual chairs were stacked with books. "Where?"

"The floor if you have to. There's a couch in the next room." Bobbi shook her head. "Jim Murphy didn't send you to me just 'cause the demon you're lookin' for's particularly bad, he sent you to me 'cause you needed a teacher." She opened her mouth, no doubt to rain curses down upon Father James Murphy, but then froze. She held up a finger in a general "just a minute" gesture, walked to the door, and opened it. "You girls wanna stop botherin' that dog and come inside?"

A moment later John's four-year-old barreled in with her usual boundless energy and curiosity, but this time Deanna was only a fraction of a second behind.

John glowered at Bobbi. "I thought you said that thing wouldn't bite."

"Bite, no. Howl, yes. There's. . . ." She hesitated. "There's an old tv and a couch in the next room. Make yourselves comfortable while your daddy and I talk business here."

This, of course, pleased Sam enormously, since John had officially banned the idiot tube in the last motel room for the sake of his sleep and sanity. Deanna rolled her eyes and followed, and the two of them filed into the next room.

"Gonna hear a 'why's there only three channels' in a minute," Bobbi predicted, crossed her arms over her chest, and treated John to a second shot of that long, searching look. "You wanna know more 'bout demons than Jim Murphy can teach," she observed.

John steeled himself for questions he really didn't care to answer.

But Bobbi just shook her head. "Ain't my business why. If Jim sent you, it means he thinks you oughta know. But you're gonna be pourin' over books with me for a couple of days. You've got little kids, which means I'm not gonna send you into town for a place to stay. They prob'ly don't need a thirty-minute drive every morning." She pulled a book off the shelf and passed it to him. "You'll want this."

John took it silently, not entirely certain what had just happened.

"Meanwhile," Bobbi added, "I'm gonna call Jim and ream him out for not givin' me any warning."

* * *

John's kids were fascinated by the black and white television. Apparently the novelty made up for the lack of channels. He joined them on the old couch and flipped through the book a little, listening to Bobbi's indistinct yelling on the other side of the house until it came to a stop. After awhile, she even appeared from the kitchen with a bowl of tuna salad that needed to be eaten and a loaf of bread.

Appearing, unasked, at a decent time with food in hand apparently made Bobbi an angel in the eyes of the girls.

John tried not to feel guilty about that. It wasn't as though he didn't keep the kids fed, it was just that he was sometimes a lot later with dinner than he'd intended.

Somewhere in the middle of the Winchesters' descent upon tuna salad, Bobbi picked up the book, cussed John out for earmarking some of the pages, and examined the ones he'd done it to with some interest. Once the tuna was no more, she'd gotten him another book.

Over the next couple of days he found himself learning as much about Bobbi as he did about demons.

She fussed over the books, which were meticulously arranged according to a criteria that only Bobbi understood, and if John disturbed the stacks he could expect to be shouted at at length. Apparently it had taken years to achieve the carefully arranged disaster that now passed for her living room library.

Deanna crawling under the hood while she was working on a car was simply a kid being curious. _John_ ducking under there to ask if she needed any help was cause for more shouting, and possibly having a wrench thrown at him. She did not need him feeling guilty for parking here and wanting to help around the yard. Hunters passed through all the time. She did not care that he was a mechanic and knew a faster way to do that.

She was more bluster than bite, though. Judging from target practice with a rifle and a couple of beer cans, she'd thrown that wrench to miss.

The girls _adored_ her. John wasn't entirely certain why. Bobbi had to be grumpier than he was, and that took some effort. She answered questions in one or two words if possible, and when Sam discovered the mud hole out back, she'd gotten the hose and thoroughly soaked the both of them down to their underclothes without a word.

On the other hand, she put up with Deanna when the girl wanted to watch so closely she was practically breathing down the poor woman's neck, and would show her something again if Dee asked. And in addition to having the coolest dogs ever in Samantha's carefully considered opinion, she didn't actually care if anything from her couch to some of the junk in the salvage yard was used as a jungle gym.

She'd also admitted, to John's amusement, that there was holy water in every bottle of moonshine in her home. That was the kind of sense of humor he could get behind.

She eventually packed him off with one or two of the books she wasn't worried about seeing again and told him to keep the lousy muffler so she had some warning next time, and John decided that he maybe liked Bobbi Singer as an information source after all.

* * *

"Where are we going?"

John wasn't entirely certain when Deanna had gotten old enough to wonder about the destination rather than just accepting the inevitability of the ride. There were days he kind of missed the four-year-old girl in the backseat who didn't notice road signs and accepted it on utter, unproven confidence that they would wind up somewhere to turn into a temporary home that no one would hate too much. That confidence had never really left, it was just that now Deanna wanted to know _where_ that place was going to be, and whether or not she was going to be expected to get Sammy to school every day, and all those other little things that came of his child thinking that far ahead these days.

He sighed. "Well, right now, I want to swing by Bobbi Singer's and ask her a couple of questions."

The car suddenly lit up with the kind of joy that accompanied ice cream. "We're going to Bobbi's?" Sam asked.

John glanced into the backseat, where his four-year-old had been utterly ignoring the conversation in the front seat just moments before. Now, Sam was looking expectantly at him. "What's so interesting about Bobbi's?" he asked. He couldn't remember anything that he would have thought merited the full attention of a little girl, and especially not anything that would be remembered six months later.

"I like her doggies," Sam pointed out.

Except that. Sam liked the furry things. Fair enough. He glanced at his eldest. "She's interestin'," Deanna said, as though this explained _everything_.

"All right, then," John answered. It was nice to be met with enthusiasm for the destination for once.

* * *

Bobbi had the information he was looking for. This time, John didn't have to admit that he didn't know the answer to any of her questions, and she found the exorcism he was going to need fairly easily and with minimal grumbling.

While John copied it out into his journal, Bobbi glanced out the window.

"What're they up to?" John asked. They'd left the girls outside with the part-rottie named Martha again.

"'S okay. She doesn't seem to mind bein' used as a horse," Bobbi answered.

John double-checked to make sure he had a decent Latin pronunciation guide in the journal before flipping it closed and getting to his feet. "Thanks."

Bobbi shrugged. "You packin' up as soon as this thing's back in Hell?"

John blinked. That seemed a somehow more intrusive question than Bobbi had ever asked. Then he realized it was because Bobbi had never said a word about his personal life before. "I don't see any reason to _stay_. Why?"

"If you don't wanna be lookin' after both demons and those hooligans, I think I could live with the company." She tapped the book he'd copied the exorcism out of. "With that it won't be more'n a couple of days anyway, an' its not like demon huntin' grounds're a good place for kids."

John opened his mouth to say thanks but no thanks, but whether he liked it or not, he hesitated. He loved the girls, and he wanted them as close as he could keep them just in case anything nasty creeped up in the middle of the night. But he had to admit that there was something relaxing on late-night errands when he was alone in a car without bored children. And they had expended most of their entertainment on the way here. No kids would also mean that he wouldn't leave a motel room totally trashed for once.

He'd left them with Jim Murphy before, and he knew Bobbi was as capable of looking after them as the priest. Possibly more. There was no reason he ought to say no.

Except for the one he didn't want to admit, which was the chivalrous bastard again. Hunting was something _daddy_ did. Bobbi was . . . well, Bobbi was a woman. There was still some mad, scrabbling hope that he wouldn't have to show either of them how to salt-and-burn the bones. That same mad hope wasn't certain it wanted a female example of what daddy did in their lives.

He also knew the chivalrous bastard had lost that battle a long time ago. Saying yes was practical. "Well, the girls do like you."

* * *

This time when he got back, John only ducked under the hood of the car because she hadn't acknowledged him pulling up. He didn't say anything, though, much less about the engine she was staring at. He knew better than that by now.

"I heard you come back," she said eventually. "Girls're inside. Apparently I had a ten-year-old Monopoly board in the back closet."

John nodded, even though Bobbi wasn't looking anywhere near him.

She glanced at him a moment later anyway, as though she knew he'd done it. "Gonna have to replace the starter," she said. "Might have to order it, too. Tom'll be real happy 'bout that."

It was the first time Bobbi had actually said anything to him about the various machines she either fixed up or stripped for parts, no matter how awkwardly he had hung around some days. John blinked, wondering if he'd passed some kind of test. "Hunh."

* * *

That night, after he'd gotten the girls in bed, Bobbi broke out a six-pack John recognized the label on and passed him a bottle.

John was still trying to figure out whether or not there was a reason for this.

"So," Bobbi said, twisting the cap off her own longneck, "you wanna tell me what demon you're always lookin' for?"

"What?"

Bobbi raised an eyebrow. "Pretty sure it's a demon, the kinda questions you asked."

John remembered the first day he had seen her library, and the shelf of books she'd gestured expansively at before telling him he'd been sent there to learn about demons, not just get information. He also remembered how she hadn't asked any questions then. Maybe she'd just been saving them for a time when she thought he'd be more ready to answer.

Bobby, however, jerked a finger back at the library. "I just thought that I got enough back there, that I might be able to help a friend put somethin' to rest."

"Friend," John repeated. It wasn't a word that had seen much use in recent years. Sure, Caleb picked up his phone readily and was useful, and he supposed he couldn't call Jim Murphy anything but a friend, but it wasn't a word either of them had appropriated for themselves, or applied to him in their presence. It didn't seem particularly necessary.

"You trust me with your daughters, John, so I hope to hell I'm a friend."

John nodded. After a moment, he added, "It's the thing that killed the girl's mother."

Bobbi didn't answer. She did put the beer on the coffee table just in case he decided he wanted another in the middle of telling the story. And, somehow, she got the entire story out of him without saying a word. The night of the fire, his first couple of talks with Missouri Moseley, and the eventual decision to leave Lawrence behind for good in search of it.

There was a long pause after he finished, while Bobbi picked thoughtfully at the beer label. "I can point you in a coupla directions," she said finally. "Can't give you a name, though. Sorry."

John nodded.

"Did wonder what'd happened, that you were out here with two little'uns and them without a momma, but it wasn't my business." Bobbi shook her head. "Demons got me here, too," she added quietly, and lifted the bottle to her lips.

John raised an eyebrow.

"My late husband. Kevin. Possession. Dug up everything I could find, tried everything I could think of . . . but getting' that thing outta him cost me him. Kept researchin' afterwards. Seemed the thing to do with his memory."

For some time things were so quiet between the two of them that John swore he could hear it when Sammy rolled over on the old mattress in her sleep. Then Bobbi shrugged. "Kevin's story's over, though. Maybe you can say that 'bout your Mary's sometime."

* * *

Bobbi sat in the passenger seat, staring absently out the window at the tableau before them. There were five demons out there. They had, apparently, decided that the best way to conceal themselves was by hiding at a tailgate.

"What is this even _for_?" John asked.

"Local football game," Bobbi guessed.

John nodded.

He had only hazy memories about how he'd wound up with Bobbi in the car. The girls were back at Singer Salvage, where there were protective sigils, dogs, and Bobbi's reputation to keep them safe. Bobbi had insisted that with that many demons, he wasn't taking the girls anywhere near them. John had agreed readily about that one, especially when he thought that she'd be there, too.

But Bobbi had also insisted that he wasn't walking in on that many demons on his own, and sometime in the middle of that heated discussion, he'd realized that she had him backed against her living room wall. John couldn't remember the last time he'd been backed against a wall by a woman. Shock was probably one of the reasons he'd given in.

Now, he just tapped his fingers on the wheel. "How do we get them separated from the pack?"

Bobbi raised an eyebrow, and John liked the look of the grin she shot him. "We don't. there'll be a keg 'round here somewhere. They'll be tryin' to blend in."

"So we're s'posed to go from chasing five demons to chasing five _drunk_ demons?"

"You've got holy water and a crucifix in the trunk, don'tcha?"

John grinned back. "Average tailgater's not allergic to the beer."

"Somethin' like that. It'll keep 'em distracted while we set up a mass exorcism."

There were certainly things to like about Bobbi Singer's style.

* * *

"John, you wanna come outside and tell your daughter that hangin' out on my roof's not exactly safe?" Bobbi asked, coming in from the yard. "She just told me she wasn't gonna hurt my shingles."

John looked up from the guns he was cleaning. "Which one?"

Bobbi rolled her eyes. "The one that's not three feet behind you tryin' to fix your EMF meter."

John got to his feet and started towards the door. "_Sam_!"

Bobbi made a noise somewhere between a chuckle and a sigh and came round the couch to stare at where Deanna had all the little pieces laid out on the floor. The eleven-year-old looked up at her and reached for the little screwdriver.

"Never did have much to do with the little things," Bobbi admitted.

Deanna shrugged. "I think something's wrong with the wiring." But she didn't turn back to the device in question, so Bobbi just leaned against the couch and waited for her to start talking. After all, she'd waited out far more than a curious little girl, even one experienced in waiting out her own little sister.

"Bobbi?" Deanna said finally. "You an' . . . an' my dad. . . ."

"Yeah?"

Deanna struggled to finish the sentence for a minute or two and gave up. "He doesn't just let anyone hunt with him."

"No."

"You've gone on a few."

"Yeah."

"Even though he _really_ doesn't like takin' girls along with him."

Bobbi snorted. "He can handle me."

"I know." Dee looked down at the screwdriver and flipped it around in her hands a few times. "He's, uh, said something about maybe letting me help a coupla times, too, but. . . ."

_John Winchester, you're not doing these girls any good that way._ But this wasn't what was on Deanna's mind, so Bobbi just said, "You got a point, there, Dee?"

Deanna swallowed. "He keeps comin' back."

"Oh."

"An' . . . an' you've never actually shot at him."

Bobbi wondered when never making good on a threat to get out her shotgun had become a measure of affection. But she supposed in the weird lives of the Winchesters, it made as much sense as anything else.

"So, you don't actually _mind_ him comin' back."

"You're daddy's a good friend when he's not bein' an ornery bastard."

Dee gave her a very _knowing_ look.

Bobbi changed the subject with all the smoothness of John in an awkward moment. "If I get you an old radio, d'you think it'd have the wires you need to fix that thing?"

* * *

When Deanna was fifteen, she was old enough to deeply resent being dumped at Bobbi's for a few weeks around Christmas while her father went on a solo hunt. Sam, however, had been almost obscenely pleased to be somewhere where she knew the nearest neighbor's name and the clerk at the grocery smiled and asked how she was doing by name.

Bobbi didn't mind the company too much, although she'd been a little bit surprised that John had been so willing to take advantage of this. Normally, if he dropped by for something and the hunt was hot, she had to tell him, point blank, that it wasn't a situation he ought to be taking kids in before he even considered the possibility of leaving them behind. He preferred them around to protect them.

Perhaps the combination of energetic Sam and increasingly surly Dee had merely been conspiring to drive him batshit. Deanna wanted to _help_, and making certain nosy little sisters didn't break their necks was not nearly as satisfying as plugging the things in the dark.

Fortunately, at Bobbi's, Sam was still enamoured with the library. It was only in the past couple of years that she'd become aware of the details of her father's work, and while she certainly hadn't appreciated being lied to (Bobbi had gotten a phone call about that, because while Deanna had done her best to handle the betrayal, Sam had still felt that Dee didn't understand) the truth opened up a world she was determined to understand.

Bobbi wasn't quite certain how that was going to work out, but for now it kept the eleven-year-old busy after the sun went down. It was the teenager - the usually _easy_ one - that was causing the problems, now. Deanna had grown up knowing what was out there, and she was beginning to resent what kept her from protecting people.

Still, Bobbi knew that focusing on one thing wasn't good for the kid and tried her best to distract her. Sometime in the middle of a black-and-white basketball game - Bobbi saw no reason to replace her still-working television - she asked how high school was going.

She probably should have known better than to ask about school. It had never been Dee's favorite subject. "It's gotten even more boring," Deanna grumbled. "And so. . . ." She fumbled for a moment, trying to describe literature and abstract math and the administration's insistence that she learn a foreign language and her various Latin teachers' frustration with her church Latin pronunciation. "Anything else feels more _real_," she grumbled. "I'd rather be out there. Under the hood of the car if nothing else."

Bobbi offered the only reasonable consolation. "Take shop. You move 'round enough, you oughta be able to take it every year if you play your cards right. Least then you'll be able to work with your hands."

Deanna was generally a lot more cheerful, compliant, and frankly _motherly_ than John, but there was something that reminded Bobbi of John in Dee nonetheless. It was the way she'd gotten so wrapped around her father's mission so young, the way the both of them stayed fueled on Mary Winchester's death. John had pulled Deanna in with him, and Bobbi had seen enough hunters to accept it and make sure that Deanna knew she could always call Bobbi for information or help. It wasn't as though she was the girl's momma.

It was Sam, who had been kept out of it as long as John could manage, who Bobbi couldn't tell how would turn out.

* * *

Deanna had gone into town for groceries, and Sam was insisting on Christmas decorations and therefore stringing up perfectly good popcorn when the phone rang. Bobbi sighed, strode over to the kitchen, and picked it up. "Singer Salvage."

"Hey, Bobbi," John greeted her. "The girls around?"

"One of 'em. Not puttin' Sam on the phone, though, 'cause I can hear in your voice how bad you got nailed. What was it?"

"Black dog. I'm fine."

"That's why I can hear your ribs creakin' from here," Bobbi said drily.

"So maybe I'm not as young as I used to be," John admitted. "But it's nothing that'll kill me and nothing that a few days passed out on a motel bed won't make better. I'll just be a few days later than I meant to be."

"Yeah." Bobbi glanced at the calendar that hung over the sink. It was a plain, two-year affair without pictures, but she marked the days off of it. It was now the twenty-third. John said he'd be back by Christmas. "I'll tell 'em."

"Sure you don't wanna hand the phone to Sam?"

"I like my eardrums, John."

There was a pause while John considered whether or not to insist. "All right," he said. "I'll see you in three or four days."

Bobbi hung up the phone and turned to see Sam standing in the doorway with the empty bowl. "Dad's not gonna be back in time, is he?" she asked quietly.

"He got hurt."

Sam nodded, and dumped it in the sink with the other dishes no one had gotten to quite yet. She stared at Bobbi a moment, bouncing slightly on the balls of her sneakers. "Bobbi?" she asked quietly.

"Yeah?"

"You, um, you like Dad, right?"

"Well, I've never actually pulled the shotgun on the son of a bitch."

Sam nodded. Like her sister several years ago, she seemed to think that when it came to her father, empty threats were a sign of some deep affection. "And he likes you."

"Hopefully, if he's leavin' you girls with me." Bobbi eyed the dishes in the sink and decided that she might take care of them rather than watch Sam clutter her bookshelves up with popcorn chains.

Sam bounced up and down a few more times, clearly working up her courage. "An' - an' you like me an' Dee."

Bobbi raised an eyebrow and picked up the popcorn bowl. "Of course I do."

"Do you think he might ask you out ever?" It all came out in a rush.

Bobbi nearly dropped the bowl back in the sink. "_What_?"

"Only I wouldn't mind having you for a mom," Sam clarified, and then scurried off to hang the popcorn chains before Bobbi could work up some kind of an answer.

* * *

When John came back and collapsed on Bobbi's couch, clearly still in some kind of pain, it was at one in the morning and the girls were actually in bed at a decent hour. Bobbi had finances open on her lap, and while she ignored him, waiting for him to talk, she couldn't help but notice that he sat on the middle cushion when there was nothing on the other end.

There had been a lot of that, really, now that she thought about it. The two of them drawing closer without actually touching, and never, ever drawing attention to it.

When John's only greeting was a soft moan, Bobbi broke the silence. "You could've showered before coming down here, you know."

"You want me to take one before I hit the sack?"

Bobbi shrugged and closed the finance book. Coming from John Winchester, that was practically an open invitation to conversation. "You probably ought to stop makin' those girls promises. You don't keep 'em."

John sat up and glowered at her. "Are you really gonna lecture me about how to raise my children?"

Bobbi thought she'd been just offering some basic advice, but she shrugged. "Lecture over." And then, because she hadn't been in the mood to have her head bit off, added, "Also, your youngest wants to know if you're ever gonna ask me out."

That, at least, brought John up short. "What?"

"I thought you might like to know the question's coming," Bobbi answered, enjoying the shocked look on his face and pretending that it wasn't probably a mirror of what her's had looked like when Sam asked.

* * *

John and the girls bobbed in and out of her life for awhile, the in being more comfortable than the out, on the whole. Deanna was the most likely to pick up the phone and ask for advice, and most of it was straightforward advice, like how to fix a car part to the point her father wouldn't notice she'd damaged it, or how far she'd have to be from a house if the best solution was just to salt and burn the entire thing. After the first few tentative forays into sex advice, she seemed to decide that she'd rather just figure it out herself.

John still occasionally came looking for such-and-such a book or piece of machinery or type of ammo, and she still occasionally insisted that he needed a partner over the age of twenty if he was really going to go after that. Life, in short, continued as usual.

But he thought she was _blind_ if he didn't think she was aware of the way he blew hot and cold on the issue of personal space, sometimes fidgeting if they were on the same side of the room and sometimes making excuses to duck into the same old washing machine or under the hood of the same car. She'd seen enough people like John to know what was going on.

He'd come back to Bobbi's at some point. She had the best library for demons in the lower forty-eight states, and it was a demon he wanted to kill with every fiber in his being. Eventually, he'd have to.

But it might not be anytime soon. And John Winchester was a contrary bastard a lot of the time, but he was smart enough to want to be able to look her in the eye whenever he did show up.

* * *

Bobbi was not fond of late-night phone calls, and so when this one came, she greeted the caller with, "This is a fuckin' emergency, right?"

"Well, not . . . exactly."

"Sam?"

There was a pause. "Did I wake you up?"

"Don't matter now. What's wrong?"

"I'm just . . . ugh."

Bobbi did a quick mental count on the girl's age. She hadn't talked to a Winchester in a little over a year - John seemed to be in an avoiding her mood again - and Sam was fifteen now. Fifteen was thirty years past for Bobbi Singer, but she knew it was kind of an awkward age for a kid, and certainly far past the age where Sam would be comfortable talking to her father about anything that fell under the label of "growing up."

"Where's Dee?" she asked.

"With Dad."

"How long?"

"Nearly a week."

Bobbi shifted her weight against the wall so she was a little more comfortable standing by the phone. A week was not a long time for Deanna and John to be gone, if there was something real going on. This might very well take awhile. "Startin' to worry?"

"Not about them."

Clearly late-night sentence fragments were not going to properly communicate Samantha's distress. "You're gonna have to tell me what's what, Sam. I'm not there."

There was a soft whump on the other end of the line, the sound of a teenage girl sprawling across the nearest motel bed. "Have you ever just wanted to run away?"

Bobbi decided that now was not the time to point out that she lived on the very edge of the grid and considered her week busy if she talked to three different people. Bobbi's running away had involved burying herself in her work so deeply that most of the world had forgotten her. "You thinkin' 'bout runnin' away, then?"

There was a static rush as Sam sighed on the other end of the line.

Bobbi waited. If she could wait out Deanna, then Sam was no contest.

What she hadn't been expecting was a rush of information that grew gradually more and more muffled as the girl tried not to cry. She got told a little about school and a lot about long nights waiting for either Dad or Deanna to check in with a text, and some garbled, half-finished thoughts about being sick of never feeling truly safe. Of having a jackknife in the pocket of her purse.

Sam, apparently, wanted all of this to be over. She wanted _stable_, which was one thing John Winchester had never managed to provide.

And then there was silence for long enough that if Bobbi hadn't been able to hear the girl's breathing on the other end of the line, she might have thought Sam had hung up.

"Sam?" Bobbi asked. "Why'd you call?"

Sam didn't answer.

Bobbi rather suspected it was because the answer was so bloody obvious. "You're all packed up, ain't ya?"

"Not going anywhere with it," Sam grumbled.

For awhile, the two of them stayed quiet on each end of the line. But Bobbi had heard the kind of begging in Sam's voice, she was just working out what she wanted to do with it. After all, there was fifteen months of silence between her and the Winchesters that could change things. It probably didn't matter, though. John was a creature of habit, as paranoid as he was.

"If you change your mind," Bobbi said, "leave your daddy a note. And I'll open the door."

* * *

Five hours later, it was nearly dawn and there was a knock at her door. Bobbi let Sam in.

She'd grown, a lot, in a year and a half, and was now angling for the tallest girl Bobbi'd ever met. She was wearing sensible and somewhat battered army-surplus boots, but it was clear that Sam paid a little bit more attention to the ideas of fashion than Dee or Bobbi ever had. Sam had been curious about skirts and other girl stuff at thirteen even as her sister preferred practical jeans that maybe form-fit a little more than boy's things, and that had flowered into a determination to dress like a_ normal_ fifteen-year-old girl while still not being _useless _in a fight, and she'd been mostly successful, even if Bobbi would have told her to lay off the eyeshadow. Bobbi had been telling teenage girls to lay off the eyeshadow since about 1978, though.

"Hungry?" Bobbi asked, because Sam's physical markers of rebellion were not the issue here.

"I could eat."

Just as she had the first time a Winchester had appeared at Singer Salvage, Bobbi made tuna salad sandwiches. Sam ate two of them and fed another one to the dog.

Bobbi only grumbled a little about spoiling the animal.

"What do I tell your daddy when he calls?" Bobbi asked.

The look on Sam's face said clearly that she'd prefer "she's not here," but she had the sense not to say that out loud. But it did open another floodgate, which was precisely what Bobbi had been expecting. Sam was the only Winchester that was any good at talking about feelings - Deanna took after her father and would rather talk about anything else - and now she got going. She talked about school and grades and the look on her father's face when she first mentioned the possibility of college, and a million little things that suddenly seemed so important when she was a fifteen-year-old girl who was trying to live her own life. John's safety measures were apparently at once controlling and at the same time would never, ever be good enough.

Samantha Winchester was resigned to abnormal. What she wanted, on the other hand, was safe.

Bobbi let her have a bottle of the moonshine when she asked for a beer, let her talk her into silence, and then suggested that they both get their asses in bed. John was in over his head with this one. And Bobbi knew he wouldn't like the suggestions she had.

* * *

The angry phone call came sometime around nine the next evening. "Hallo, John." She didn't see any need for anything like caller ID, but unless she'd finally been located by some friendly government agency or a spokesman for some political party, it couldn't be anyone else.

John didn't even bother with the niceties. "She there?"

"Yeah."

"You tell her to come?"

"No. I told her if she was gonna go somewhere, she was gonna go here. I didn't want her runnin' off somewhere she might get herself hurt."

"I'll be there to pick her up tomorrow morning."

Bobbi sighed. "Think you oughta look into why she ran?"

There was a pause.

Then John said, in his surliest tone, "_Should_ I, Bobbi?"

"John." Bobbi sighed. Maybe she and John Winchester had had a few loud debates about the proper rearing of teen girls. Maybe she should have been a little more sublte. But Bobbi never had been good at subtle, so she just told John why he should care. "She's tired of bein' scared."

John said several words he wouldn't have had Bobbi counted as mixed company. "It's not like Dee and I aren't around to look after her," he growled.

"You're two of the things she's scared _for_. And face it, John, you have a habit of disappearin', and those girls've been old enough for a long time to know that you might never reappear."

John growled something again. "Why you?"

"She called _me_. An' I can only give her the help she's willing' to take." Bobbi hesitated. She could tell him a lot about why Sam had called her and not any of the other people that John had gotten close enough to to trust with his children over the years. "Honestly?"

"I would've hung up this phone and be across the county line if I weren't listenin' to you be honest with me."

He had a point. There were only a few people John put up with bitching back, and Bobbi was one of them.

"That fire was Deanna's tragedy as well as yours, but Sam never got a chance to remember her momma. And Dee can't be Mary, John, she can't be Mary for either of you, and the girl was lookin' for the kind of advice it takes someone older than Dee to give." Bobbi took a deep breath. "I'm the closest thing to that Sammy's got."

There was a strangled noise on the other end of the line. Then a thump or two, as John took his frustration out on the nearest piece of furniture. Then, finally, "Let me talk to her."

Bobbi glanced into the next room, where Sam was on the floor behind the couch with the dog, and trying to pretend she didn't know who was on the phone. "Have you had a shouting match 'bout whether or not you're tryin' to control her this month?" she asked.

"It's a weekly occurance these days, Bobbi."

"Do you want this week's to happen now?"

"Dammit, this is _my daughter_ we're talking about. Put her on the phone."

"John, breathe."

"I'm breathing just fine."

Bobbi nodded. "Of course. That's why you can shout so loud. Will you get some sleep before you come out here? And listen when she starts talkin'?"

"_Bobbi_."

"I'm just sayin', John, the girl knows her own mind."

"I'm headed out there in the morning."

"Good." Bobbi muffled the phone against her chest and turned towards the runaway daughter in question. "Sam, your daddy's on the phone."

* * *

John didn't get much sleep that night. Sam had made that choking, trying-not-to-cry sound on the phone, and she'd refused to apologize for running off. John wasn't certain which was worse. And Bobbi's words, that his daughter was tired of being scared all the time, kept echoing around in his head.

He was so far past the point of anger at the things in the dark that he didn't really fear them. He knew Dee did, sometimes, but he could watch her learn to use that fear. Deanna's primary focus was and had always been the burning need to protect her family. He knew Sam got scared, too, when he absolutely had to have her out there.

He'd always thought that Sam knew he and Deanna were good enough that they weren't going to get killed. She'd believed that once, when she'd first found out about the things in the dark. And he'd never considered that fear for other people was something a young girl would try to run from.

Bobbi would have told him this was because he was a fucking idiot.

The drive to the salvage yard in the morning was uncomfortably quiet, because Deanna appeared to be as wrapped up in her thoughts as John was in his.

Bobbi sent Sam out to meet him on the porch, and Dee refused to get out of the car. They had another of their increasingly frequent fights. It was everything that had been said before, a few things he'd said last night, and an angry, awkward attempt to apologize for the way the world had turned out. If she'd run away, John knew something needed to change, but he was damned if he knew what.

Sam made the first break for it she could, joining Dee in the Impala. Dee slid into the driver's seat and let her little sister ride shotgun, leaned out the driver's side window and called, "Town?"

John shrugged helplessly. Clearly cooling off once hadn't done enough.

Deanna raised an impressive cloud of dust at the girls' departure, and John went inside to find Bobbi.

She was washing up in the kitchen. John rarely saw her doing something ordinarily domestic like that. She didn't seem to like showing him it, or maybe it was just that it was something relatively easy to get the girls to do. He didn't know. "I don't know if I should be thankin' you or cussin' you out," he said.

"Both's possible," she said.

"I don't know what to do with her anymore."

"No shit." Bobby shook suds off the plate in her hands and placed it on the drying rack. John, who never liked watching someone do housework when he could help, grabbed the nearest clean towel and started drying it by hand. He might not know what to do with his daughters any more, but he could damn well grab a towel and know Bobbi's dishes would be dry when he was done.

She just handed him the next one. "Sam wants stable, John."

John snorted. "Knowing the family's gonna be here tomorrow was always stable enough for me and Dee."

"Sam's not you or Deanna."

It was an obvious statement. John knew it. He still didn't like it. "What am I s'posed to do? She wants a life that's not hers."

"She wants to finish high school in one place."

John sighed. "I can't garauntee that. You're the one who told me to stop making 'em promises. If I get a lead—"

"Let her finish it here."

That brought John up short. "What?"

She passed him a coffee mug. "I wouldn't mind."

"I can't ask you to—"

"You're not askin', I'm offerin'. There's a difference. I haven't actually offered it to Sam, yet, 'cause you're still her daddy, but you can't claim I can't protect her. You can't claim I don't care 'bout her. And dammit, John, what Sam wants is something _real_. Something she can say she's proud of."

John hesitated, and he put the mug down slowly before the wet ceramic slipped out of his fingers and broke on the floor. "I wish I could give it to her," he said quietly.

Bobbi continued washing dishes, waiting.

"When I started this . . . I didn't think it was gonna take this long. I never expected that thing to just . . . to just disappear." He sighed. "I want Sam to be able to make friends she won't leave behind, I want to Dee to have a home. But that's just not the way things worked out."

He felt damp seeping into his shirt at the shoulder, and it took him a moment to realize that Bobbi'd taken hold of it.

"Tellin' Sam its okay to stick it out in one place might go a long way towards mendin' some of those broken bridges," she pointed out.

John didn't know. "I trust you, Bobbi, but I still don't like it. I like her with me most of the time."

"Not like I've ever tossed you out before," Bobbi pointed out. "I wouldn't mind seein' you and Dee round the place a bit more often, either. I hear from you often enough I get fidgetty when you ain't called in awhile anyway."

John sighed. It was there in her glance.

There was some kind of chasm between him and Bobbi, one they were both too reeling over lost spouses to think about crossing. But it was there in the way they didn't object when the other one filled up their personal space, never touching and never saying anything, and in the way she had cussed him out for not calling in seven months before. It was there in the quiet voice that spoke under Dee and Sam's snores in the next bed some nights, that he was old and tired and it might be nice to come home after the chase to someone with some history behind them. Someone who understood the things Deanna and Sam were too young to get.

He glanced down at his ring. Oh, there had been women after Mary, but never one he'd come home to. Bobbi'd said it years ago - her story wasn't _over,_ and anything like a girlfriend and a home had felt like some sort of betrayal. He knew there was still a ring on his friend's finger to, and he had a feeling Bobbi felt something similar about Kevin. But he was beginning to wonder if it would ever be over, and he wondered if maybe Mary would rather he give the girls a _home_. It wasn't like having a sometimes-base would be giving up.

He looked up at Bobbi. "Well, if Sammy's here, I'll be round more often to check up on her."

Bobbi nodded, squeezed his shoulder slightly, and turned back to the dishes. "And just maybe we can get each other through the tough nights?" she asked, as John reached for the coffee mug again.

John had an image of Bobbi in the middle of the night, on one of those hunts she had insisted she join him on. Of a groggy voice on the other end of the phone line at three in the morning, angry and cussing but not hanging up. And he looked at the woman who had looked after his runaway daughter for him. See each other through the tough nights, eh? In some ways they already did.


End file.
